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Two years after sailing into history, Long Island native Cole Brauer...who grew up in Springs...is most at home in motion — whether blasting through the ocean or traveling in the van she lives out of: the “Silver Vixen.”

Brauer, a 31-year-old, 2012 East Hampton High School graduate and world-famous ocean racer, has kept busy since making history as the first American woman to circumnavigate the globe solo in a sailboat. She's been working at marinas and making professional speeches and has written a memoir.

Alek Lewis reports in NEWSDAY that Brauer completed a 130-day, 27,000‑mile solo circumnavigation of the globe as part of the Global Solo Challenge. She placed second in a race against more than a dozen male sailors. She left from the northwest tip of Spain on Oct. 29, 2023, and completed the treacherous trip on March 7, 2024.

“It was an amazing opportunity to be able to go around the planet,” she told NEWSDAY during a recent trip back to East Hampton.

By the time she crossed the start line, Brauer had logged enough miles to have circled the globe twice. She rebuilt her boat around her own needs, knew every tool on the vessel, and completed extensive medical and safety training.

Brauer documented the journey on Instagram, where she has amassed close to a half million followers.

Her memoir, “First Light,” chronicles her Bonac upbringing, the beginning of her sailing career and her historic trip. The book is scheduled to be released in September.

Brauer, who is 5-feet-2-inches and weighs 100 pounds, hardly fit the stereotype of an ocean racer, she said. “It’s a super male-dominated sport,” she said.

“You have to be competing at the exact same level — if not higher — if you want to be able to compete against [men], and I find that challenge amazing and wonderful,” she said.

The book discusses the “trials and tribulations of what it was like being a woman in a very male, older, white [sailing] community and everything that comes with that,” she said.

Randi Cherill, who was an athletic trainer at East Hampton High School when Brauer was a student, followed the trip on social media. She said she is fortunate to have played a role in Brauer’s journey as an athlete.

“What she was able to accomplish, and what she was able to do, is astounding,” Cherill said. “That’s what we like to see with our athletes and our former athletes, and who they grow up to be.”

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The long-term parking lot in East Hampton Village is getting a gated entry, an electric vehicle charging station and 26 new spaces as part of its first face-lift in years, which started earlier this month. Jack Motz reports on 27east.com that as part of the work, East Hampton Village officials plan to combine the long-term lot with the neighboring smaller lot to create one facility. At the entrance will be a parking booth and gate. The East Hampton Village Board approved the renovations in a flurry of three resolutions, totaling over $1.4 million, in February.

“It’s kind of a blind spot in the village that we want to tighten up, and we want to make more efficient, both for public safety and for enforcement,” said Village of East Hampton Administrator Marcos Baladron.

He said the lot will always remain free because the village needs the lot for spillover parking, which allows downtown employees to park during the work day.

Village officials, per Baladron, are also in the early planning stages of building a new playground at Herrick Park, and he said the new parking lot will help prepare for the additional parking that may be needed.

Also onsite is a new firehouse barn that village officials plan to use for storing and displaying antique firetrucks, of which the East Hampton Fire Department has many. The building will double as a means of filling a public safety blind spot.

“It’s going to be used for recruitment, and it’s going to be where the public can kind of go see those antiques and enjoy it, number one,” Baladron said. “Number two, it gives us the ability to have internet access in that area, which is kind of far away from many of our other buildings.”

This will allow for additional security, Baladron said, in an area where many East Hampton Village employees, currently, have to walk back to their cars in the dark at the end of the work day.

“It’s kind of needed that face-lift anyway,” he said. “If we weren’t merging the two lots, we probably would have just fixed it anyway, so we’re doing that as well. On an improvement level, it’s better. On a safety level, it’s better. I think it’s just going to be a better, more efficient lot.”

The work will continue throughout this month and into April. The long-term lot is currently closed, but the lot immediately to the west, which will be combined with the long-term lot, is open for parking in East Hampton Village.

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